Spring 2010

Features

Of Time and Wildness in the North Cascades :: Bob Mierendorf has spent the last couple of decades trying to convince the archaeological establishment that pre-contact Northwest Indians did not confine themselves to the lowlands, but frequented the high country. Now he has an ancient camping site to make his point. by Tim Steury

Gangs of Chicago

Fifty years ago James F.
Short Jr., a young sociologist at Washington State University, was asked
to lead a study of Chicago gangs.

In smoky pool halls on Roosevelt Road, the baseball fields of Douglas
Park, and the windy street corners of Lawndale, Short and a team of
youth workers and sociologists spent three years trying to figure out if
boys with monikers like Smack Daddy, Duke, and Commando were so very
different from their counterparts in wealthier parts of the city.

The resulting groundbreaking analysis opened a window into the
everyday experience of the Vice Lords, the Egyptian Cobras, the
Imperial Chaplains, and the Blackstone Rangers and set the stage for
gang research for years to come.

Though it’s true that the gang members’ confrontations were much more
likely to escalate into violence, complete with knives and chains and
the occasional zip gun, it’s also true that the majority of their time
was spent on non-criminal activities. More than that, the gang boys
reported valuing such establishment virtues as studying hard for good
grades, reading good books, and saving for a rainy day in exactly the
same measure as their middle-class counterparts.

In 1965, Short and his University of
Chicago colleague Fred Strodtbeck published their findings and more in
the now classic Group Process and Gang Delinquency. Ten years
later they followed up with two of the gangs, the Vice Lords and the
Nobles, and discovered that about one in five of the boys in the first
study had died. There’s no way to know how many are still alive, but
that three-year project lives on and is informing new research today.

No one is more surprised by that than Short, who joined the WSU
faculty in 1951, and still has an office on campus. It’s an unassuming
space, so crowded with books and papers and filing cabinets that a
visitor must enter and shut the door before she can find a place to sit.
But it’s in a building that bears his name, Wilson-Short Hall.

“I just find it fascinating,” Short says, “here I am, more than half
a century after these data were collected, (still) enjoying analyzing
(them).” On this day in December Short is looking at a computer screen
showing a map of where gang members lived during the Chicago Project.
The map was sent to him by Lorine Hughes ’03 PhD, a former graduate
student and the person he credits with breathing new life into his old
data. “She dazzled me with her statistical legerdemain,” he laughs.

What jumps out at Short from the map is that black gang members were
much more tightly clustered—suggesting their activities were more
constrained—than the white gang members. Does that have something to do
with why black gangs were involved in more fights than white gangs? It’s
something Short and Hughes, now a sociologist at the University of
Nebraska, are trying to determine.

The data might be old, but in the subsequent 50 years there hasn’t
been another gang research project that approaches it. Time, money, and
access are three obstacles to such studies.

It’s also true that the availability of guns has made the streets
deadlier and the interest in embedding a researcher with the gangs less
pronounced. Now the gangs have AK-47s or something like that, says
Short. Then they used a variety of weapons including, on rare occasion,
crude homemade firearms called zip guns. “I have a couple zip guns
here,” says Short, digging into his desk drawer, past the paper clips
and office supplies, to pull out two absurdly lightweight weapons, now
unusable. “What they do was put in a harder metal or steel barrel so it
wouldn’t explode on them,” he said. That, and put tape around the
barrel.

“These kids weren’t stupid,” he said, smiling. “They wanted to make
sure it wouldn’t blow up on them.”

While weapons and other particulars of gang life are constantly
changing, Short and Hughes believe there are constants that govern group
processes, whether that group is made up of unsupervised youths
(Short’s own definition of a gang), university faculty, or the local
PTA. “If you think you are tapping into basic human processes, then
those should be invariant over time,” says Hughes. “Not everybody agrees
with that, but I do.”

Her statistical data are helping build that case. The original
findings were compiled into 47 black binders totaling 17,000 pages of
interviews, self-reports, observations, and assessments which, after
eight years of work, Hughes is still in the process of coding and
entering into a database. Her first focus, the one she pursued for her
doctoral dissertation, was violent disputes. When did they happen, why
did they happen and what were the circumstances when violence was
averted?

Back in 1963 Short had his hunches about what triggered the violence,
but in 2003 Hughes confirmed them. Most fights were a result of
perceived status threats and oftentimes violence was averted because
someone intervened, usually a detached worker, in a way that allowed
those involved to save face.

When Short started his work, the YMCA had plans to send youth workers
into the streets to work directly with gang members in their own
neighborhoods, and it wanted a research component to evaluate the
effectiveness of the program. Short, who earned his doctoral degree at
the University of Chicago, took a leave from WSU to direct the project,
but he had a few conditions. He wanted the time and resources to do a
thorough study.

“The idea was that it was going to be like a Kinsey Report on gang
behavior,” Short says. The public’s interest in gang behavior tends to
wax and wane, unlike interest in sex, but the data yielded an impressive
number of articles, book chapters, and graduate theses during the
1960s.

“What can be said is that virtually all major ideas about delinquent
subcultures and gangs that could be tested received attention in the
Chicago Project,” wrote Short’s colleague Robert Meier in In Social
Inquiry in 1988. Short’s book effectively became a textbook for
others wanting to study gang behavior.

Meier speculates that subsequent gang
research may have lost steam because other scholars believed Short and
Strodtbeck had said everything there was to say.

When Short returned to Pullman in the early 1960s, he set out trying
to find a way to get a read on public opinion without the time-consuming
legwork of face-to-face interviews. With the backing of President Glenn
Terrell, he and Professor Donald Dillman started the Social Research
Center, the first telephone survey research unit in the country. Short
remained its director until 1985, but in the mid-1980’s he began to
focus more on the sociology of risk. It wasn’t until Hughes showed up at
his office door in 2001, nearly five years into his retirement, that he
decided to open up those old black binders once again.

“I love what I do,” says Short. “Human behavior is so complex, and
just trying to understand it is a fascinating thing.”